Joe Biden became a fast friend of the LGBTQ community as vice president in 2012 by stating his support for same-sex marriage in a television interview even before his boss, President Barack Obama, did.
That same year, outside an Obama-Biden campaign office in Florida, it was Biden's unexpected support for the transgender community that elevated his status from an LGBTQ ally to a champion. When the mother of a Miss Trans New England pageant winner asked Biden if he would help transgender people, she later told reporters, Biden whispered that it was the "civil rights issue of our time."
Since then, Biden's views on the LGBTQ community have become clearer and louder.
When he left the vice presidency, Biden partnered with other advocates to start the As You Are campaign to advocate for families' acceptance of their transgender children, which "dramatically improves their child's self-esteem and decreases the likelihood they will experience depression or suicidal ideation," the Biden Foundation was cited as saying in a 2019 announcement.
Now advocates say the 78-year-old will be the nation's most pro-LGBTQ president ever. He and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris have promised an ambitious slate of actions that would go beyond reversing what LGBTQ advocates have called President Trump's "discrimination administration."
The Trump Accountability Project, by the advocacy group GLAAD, has recorded more than 180 anti-LGBTQ statements and actions by the Trump administration and those in the president's circle since January 2017, including a proposal that would allow homeless shelters to house transgender people according to their sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity.
The Biden family developed a close relationship with McBride after Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015. McBride's husband, Andy Cray, had died of cancer the year before.
"The president-elect has always been far out ahead on transgender issues. And I think all of us benefit from knowing people who are trans and organic agents of change in daily life," said McBride, who was elected in Delaware in November as the first openly transgender state senator in the country. "But I know Joe Biden also wants to honor and carry forward his son's work and legacy on this issue."
Joe Biden wrote the foreword for McBride's book "Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality."
In it, he calls transgender equality "the civil rights issue of our time."
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